Big Pic

July 2003:  The American Café Seventy-six years ago, in July, 1927, the staff of the American Café poses behind the counter of their soda fountain in downtown Glasgow, Kentucky. My uncle Chester and aunt Helen are on the right.  The café was operated by their parents (my grandparents), H.F. and Lydia Thomas, shown in the enlargement below. My father is not in the 1927 photo, having graduated from high school in Glasgow the year before.  But he occasionally pitched in to work at this restaurant.  He's in the middle of this group on the curb outside the café, taken a few years later. The restaurant was located in a large, high-ceilinged storeroom.  To the left of the soda counter, an open divider led to the dining room in the rear. Below, the 1927 staff reassembles  in that dining room to pose again.   The barefoot boy is another of my father's brothers, my uncle Phil, who was born in 1924.